This invention relates to calendars, and in particular to pocket diary booklets for maintaining a monthly agenda.
Pocket-sized booklets, called "agendas" or "diaries", in which the pages correspond to days of the month are well known. In such agendas, each page is printed by the manufacturer with a day of the week and a date; for example, "Tuesday, Jan. 1, 1980." Space is left on the page so that the user can write in activities which are scheduled, and additional pages may be included for telephone numbers, notes, tax records and other information.
A problem inherent in agendas of this type is that the correspondence between a day of the week and a date, such as between Tuesday and January 1, is not the same in every year. Thus, while Jan. 1, 1980 fell on a Tuesday, Jan. 1, 1979 fell on a Monday and Jan. 1, 1981 will fall on a Thursday. January 1 will not fall on a Tuesday again until 1985.
Thus, if an excess of booklets for use during January of 1980 were printed, the surplus pages could not be used again for five years. In other cases, it may be as much as eleven years before surplus pages could be used again. After these intervals, the manufacturer may find that his stock has begun to deteriorate. Consequently, economics dictate that a manufacturer produce approximately the same number of booklets for each month that he can sell, which may require him to limit the number of booklets he manufactures to the number of orders he has received.
The manufacture of calendars presents similar problems. However, since calendars run from January to December, the manufacturer must supply a new set of pages only once a year. On the other hand, the user of a set of monthly agendas may wish to begin his set at any time during the year, so one user's annual set may run, for instance, from June to May. Thus, not only must the manufacturer take orders for the agendas, he must take them every month, and predicate production on the monthly orders. This makes long-term production planning difficult, and can result in delayed deliveries, reduced efficiency and increased costs.
Since the manufacturer must wait for orders to be received, each order is virtually "custom made." This limits marketing of the agendas to catalog sales, mail orders through magazines and the like. Due to the limited life of the agendas, they are generally not sold in retail outlets.
Further, a user who loses an agenda for a particular month must attempt to obtain a replacement directly from the manufacturer. This can be time consuming, even if the manufacturer has extra copies on hand and is willing to provide individual copies.
There exists, therefore, a need for a standardized agenda which can be mass produced, and will indicate for the user the date of the month and the corresponding day of the week.